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A Holiday Parable for 2020
[Adapted from a Facebook post from December 24, 2020]
In 2002 my family went to Mzuzu, in the northern region of Malawi, for Christmas. It is about a four hour drive from Lilongwe, the capital city, and eight hours from Blantyre, where my mother still lives today. On the second or third day of that trip, Dad decided that we should take a day trip to Nyika Plateau, a beautiful plateau a couple of hours away; we would stop at the lodge owned by a friend of his, have lunch and some sodas, and then head back down to Mzuzu.
But December in Malawi is the rainy season, and so the inevitable happened — we got stuck in a thick patch of mud on one of the dirt roads up to Nyika. We got lucky on where we got stuck, though; a large bus had become stranded in the same mud just up the road from us, and so a bunch of people came and helped push the car out of the mud and onto a slightly drier part of the road. After giving everyone who’d helped out a little bit of money — for a chicken for the new year, he probably told them, as that was his shorthand for this is a gift, not an entitlement— we continued on our way.
“We can’t come back on this same road,” he said as we drove on. “But no worries — we’ll just drive up to Chitipa, turn around, and come back down on the Karonga road — we’ll be back in Mzuzu by nighttime.”
Any Malawians reading this piece will now be cracking up, because that’s exactly what did not happen — Chitipa is in fact Malawi’s northernmost district, where our northern border post with Zambia is. There was no “just going up to Chitipa.” We still stopped at Nyika, but for a 20-minute bathroom break rather than a couple of hours for lunch; nonetheless, it was 7:30pm by the time we rolled into Chitipa, and there was no way we were then going to try and set off for Mzuzu by way of Karonga at that time of night.
Somehow in the pre-smartphone era Dad still managed to find us a decent resthouse on the fly — Chitipa Inn, whose pictures I looked up for the purpose of this piece, and it still looks the same— and said we would decamp there for the evening to rest, and then leave at first light for Mzuzu. Mom, for whom the expression “cleanliness is next to Godliness” is not merely an occasional scolding lecture but a way of life, all but told us to sleep standing up.
“Don’t touch anything! Sleep on top of the covers! Don’t get in! Only drink Fanta! We’re not eating anything here!”
Except that “us” didn’t include Dad, because he’d left in search of food, and then quickly come back to the room to take my brother with him. They returned to the room again 20 minutes later, with Dad grinning triumphantly.
“They’ve just killed us a chicken. A real village chicken too, way fresher than those frozen ones at Shoprite! Come on and eat.” Dad beckoned from the door; hungry as I was I didn’t get up right away, because I’d literally just promised Mom I would only drink Fanta there, and didn’t want to look like I was capitulating so quickly to the idea of a non-Fanta dinner.
“You’re sure, Matt?” She had a fair point — an hour ago we hadn’t even known about the existence of this place, and now we were trusting them with our food? But Dad was thrilled with the adventure we were now on, and wouldn’t budge.
“If you girls want to starve, that’s your problem. The two of us are going to go eat.” And he disappeared out the door again, my brother at his side. I looked at Mom.
“I’m pretty hungry, I can’t lie,” I said.
“Traitor,” she said, but she herself had started grinning. With that me, my sister and Mom got up and walked out the room door, following my brother and Dad to the resthouse’s dining room. Right as we sat down at their table, the rainy season delivered its second gift of the day — a power outage. But even that didn’t faze Dad, who was still thoroughly pleased with what he’d turned the situation into, and the darkness was quickly illuminated by a candle placed in the middle of the table by one of the kitchen staff.
Our chicken — stewed in tomatoes and onions and served with nsima — arrived not long after, and in memory it really was one of the best chickens I have ever tasted in my life. Of course this is the kind of memory for which the chicken will always taste the best, whatever the actual truth was, but I’m still sticking to that story, because there really is nothing comparable to a good village chicken, and I’d like to remember Dad has having been right once again, as it seemed like he always was. The next day we left for Mzuzu just after daybreak, by way of the Karonga road as planned, and made it back to Mzuzu just before lunch.
As always, this story is being told apropos of nothing at all, no relevance to anything going on in our larger contexts whatsoever. Only to say that sometimes life gets you stuck in the mud, for a long time, and then you end up nearly exiting the country. It happens. Just roll with it, and turn it into a new trip with new plans; buy a village chicken, whatever your version of that is, and share it in the semi-darkness with the people you love. Tomorrow the rerouted journey continues. We’ll all make it home somehow.
